By Jennifer Ariesta
The penultimate episode of Loki season 2 is here. Like the calm before the storm, this episode is decidedly more laid back than last week’s high octane mayhem. But the time and space hijinks continue to unravel in more unexpected ways. This show keeps building on its intricate time construct. Forget everything you know from other time traveling shows and movies, because this one threw all of them out of the loop.
Following last week’s destruction of the Temporal Loom and TVA, all seems lost for our heroes. But Loki is once again glitching – time slipping in the show’s speak – and he finds himself involuntarily traveling to the original timelines of his compatriots: Mobius (who’s really a single dad working as a jet ski salesman), B-15 (a doctor from Avengers-less 2012 New York City), Casey (a prisoner just breaking out of of his Alcatraz incarceration), and O.B. (a down-on-his-luck scientist slash aspiring sci-fi writer). With the help of the Fractured Timeline’s O.B., who’s just happy that sci-fi exists in his world, Loki attempts to find his way back to TVA before the destruction.
But once again, Sylvie comes and challenges his motivation to restore TVA. This time, she has a point: with everyone returned to their original timelines, won’t it be better to just move on and have a life?
With one more episode to go, they’ve gone too far to stop now. We all know what the characters will choose. However, Sylvie’s argument actually presents an interesting dimension to Loki’s time-meddling. This episode is all about our TVA heroes and the lives they had before being kidnapped to work there. We see glimpses of their normal lives, some more cushy than the other. Therefore, when Sylvie brings up again the fact that none of these people had a choice which lives they would choose, we are shown the possibilities that had been robbed from them. Loki and Sylvie’s opposing ideologies form the show’s foundation with the conundrum between free will and ordained fate. It’s a hefty concept that will never go as far as it can in the world of MCU, but one can’t help but ponder the what if of it all.
As it is, the episode’s time-traveling heist premise provides plenty of warming-up before the big finish next week. Loki has to essentially build his team from scratch, with familiar faces who are not exactly familiar – since these versions never met him before. This honestly dampens a bit of the emotional stakes.
Indeed, multiversal existences are what Marvel hinges on their next Avengers big bad Kang The Conqueror: you can kill him, but he will still exist in a gazillion other incarnations. But if they ask audiences to root for heroes who only share the same physicality but not emotional journey, would the stake still remain? That’s something for the Marvel brain trust to consider.
Going into the finale, it becomes clear that Loki’s a wonderfully put together sci-fi show with some profound philosophical ruminations. I would have watched a version of this just about TVA and the ethical exploration behind its time tampering conceit. Too bad, sooner or later it’ll have to revert back to MCU’s grand plan.
